Lost
by I Know Your Name
Summary: Slightly AU. Edward's thoughts after he learns that Alphonse has lost all memory of the five year quest for the Philosopher's Stone.


**An idea that I can't adequately express in words which came to me after seeing Laws and Promises. I may take it off later. But at the moment...I am incredibly depressed after watching _Full Metal Alchemist_: "Laws and Promises" and _The Conqueror of Shamballa. _**

**This story is somewhat AU, especially concerning Ed's present attitude towards Alphonse (not Al). It is not incestous. The emotions expressed in this short may seem that way, and some of you may believe that. In response, I will say that some people can get extremely close to their siblings, other family members, and friends to the point to which everything in their lives revolves around those individuals. It is not a sexual love nor attraction. Realize that in FMA, Ed and Al have such a relationship. **

**_Full Metal Alchemist_, much as I love it, is not mine.**

**Please review!**

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Is selfhood personhood? What makes a person? What makes every individual unique? If a person were to lose everything, everything that they knew, and had to start life over from scratch, would that person be the same person who was born years before? 

My brother is gone. My other self is gone. Al…everything we did together, everything we suffered…has been rendered meaningless by one incident.

When I sacrificed myself for him and he was brought to life again, he became the child he was when attempted to transmute our mother.

Our mother… As far as Al is concerned, she died, but that is it. Our sacrifice, our shared suffering, is forgotten. Our adventures, and misadventures, together, the tests we took, the enemies we faced, are all forgotten. The day we became men is lost. Al is now a child again, and I feel cold to him. I feel cold to my own brother.

I feel cold to the one who loved me. I am ice to the one who protected me, who held my temper in check when I would not, who soothed me, who supported me, who sacrificed for me. I am cool to the one who never complained for himself. Though he always thought of me before himself, I cannot love him, not as I did before. I love him as a sibling, but not as a brother. I feel protective towards him, want to spend time with him, but something is missing. I could live without this person.

What we had is lost. Al is dead to me. This child that he is and yet is not is not my brother. He is another person altogether. The past five years are irrelevant to him. He can be told. He can be taught of what happened. Every incident of every minute can be listed for him. But they are no longer his moments. They are no longer his life.

We lived more in those five years than at any other time in our lives. We were together every moment of them. We bled together, suffered together, and became closer than most siblings ever do. We became each other's alter egos. Without each other we were incomplete. We revolved around each other. For each of us the entire world was bound in the existence of the other.

But Al has forgotten all of this.

No matter how much I, or anyone else, tell him, he cannot grasp what once was his. For Alphonse (he is not Al, can never be Al), the stories, though they carry his name, are not his stories. They are not his memories. He cannot connect with them, cannot feel what he felt, cannot know what he knew. He cannot feel the creak of empty armor rubbing against air, not flesh, nor know the hollow sound a voice makes when it echoes within its shell. He cannot hear the skitter of kitten claws trapped in a tin, nor the ricochet of bullets meeting hard steel.

Perhaps I am selfish. It is best that Al does not remember the suffering that we went through, the agony that we met and survived each day. It is best that he forget the doubt of his own personhood. It is best that he forget the screams of children bereft of bodies and limbs too soon or the shattering of steel met by force. It is best that he forget Roze, or Hughes, or Mustang, or…Nina. It is best that he does not remember those things which forced us to adulthood before our time. It is best that he forget our suffering.

But…

My brother is dead.


End file.
